'Sex scandal' a possible motive for small-town sheriff charged with murder of judge: police officers

The shocking murder of a Kentucky judge, allegedly by his sheriff buddy, is being investigated as a possible sex scandal, police said Sunday.

Letcher County Sheriff Shawn “Micky” Stines was friends with Judge Kevin Mullins for decades and even had lunch with him on Sept. 19, hours before he was accused of entering the judge's courtroom and shooting him eight times.

Surveillance video from the chambers showed the men switching cellphones and looking at something on them — before walking over and shooting the sheriff, sources told the Mountain Eagle.

“Our investigators have seized the two cell phones and they are being analyzed,” Kentucky State Police Trooper Matt Gayheart told the Daily Mail on Sunday.

When asked whether the investigation was also considering a possible sex scandal as a motive, the police officer confirmed: “Absolutely. We are not ruling out anything as a possible motive.”

Gayheart did not elaborate on the sex scandal in question. However, the sheriff had already been deposed days earlier in a lawsuit filed by two women, one of whom alleged that an officer forced her to have sex in Mullins' chambers for six months in exchange for her not going to prison.

The lawsuit accuses the sheriff of “deliberate indifference by failing to adequately train and supervise Deputy Ben Fields,” who pleaded guilty to raping the female prisoner while she was in home confinement.

Fields was sentenced this year to six months in prison and then six and a half years of probation for rape, sodomy, perjury and tampering with a prisoner monitoring device, The Mountain Eagle reported. Three charges related to a second woman were dismissed because she is now dead.

Stines fired Fields, who succeeded him as Mullins's bailiff, for “inappropriate conduct” after the lawsuit was filed in 2022, the Courier Journal reported at the time.

Stines and Mullins had been friends for 20 years before the murder. Stines was Mullins' bailiff before becoming sheriff in 2018.

“Until this happened, I didn’t know there would be any kind of friction between them. We all got along well and teased each other,” Letcher Circuit Clerk Mike Watts told local newspaper The Mountain Eagle.

Mullins and Stines even worked together on drug addiction and recovery projects that provided resources and education in a region ravaged by the opioid epidemic.

The sheriff reportedly came out of the courtroom after the shooting with his hands raised. However, he pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.

With post wires